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I give my heartfelt thanks to Roman Sasik for producing, from a poor facsimile, the tables of data that made it possible for me to write this report in a timely manner.

This is the fifth in a series of reports on uncounted votes in urban counties of Ohio. These are ballots cast but not counted because they were regarded as “undervotes” and “overvotes,” or “blank” and “void,” as they are known in New York State. The true number of such votes can be easily determined by subtracting votes counted from total ballots cast.

Shortly after the election I obtained from the website of the Ohio Secretary of State the data I needed to make a statewide compilation on a county by county basis of the uncounted votes, exclusive of provisional ballots. These data have since been taken down from said website. I present them here.

There are still 5,439 uncounted votes in Summit County. Presumably 132 are provisional ballots, and the other 5,307 are the regular ballots that went uncounted on Election Day.

From the Summit County canvass records I have compiled the following table, presenting separate data for the vote totals, counted and uncounted, for Akron and the suburbs. The Board of Elections has not provided a separate total for absentee ballots.

As shown in the table above, 48.72% of the uncounted votes are in Akron, which Kerry won with 68.75% of the vote to 28.00% for Bush. The percentage of uncounted votes in Akron, 2.81%, is much higher than the county wide percentage of 1.93%, and nearly twice as high as the percentage for the suburbs, 1.49%. Note that Kerry’s county wide margin of victory came entirely from the City of Akron.

I had Roman Sasik prepare a table of precincts sorted according to their percentage of uncounted ballots. Here are the results for the City of Akron:

Elsewhere in Summit County there are 17 precincts with more than 3% of the ballots uncounted. These account for 406 uncounted votes, 7.46% of the county wide total, and 4.46% of the total ballots cast in these precincts. John Kerry won all but one of these 17 precincts, by 5271 votes to 3240 for Bush.

This seems highly suspicious to me. This is not the inner city. All the standard explanations for the prevalence of spoiled ballots  voters are unsophisticated, inexperienced, or just plain ignorant  must fall by the wayside here. Bush narrowly carried the suburbs, by 423 votes over Kerry, and yet 16 of the 17 precincts with the highest percentage of uncounted votes were won by Kerry. This defies statistical probability, and cries out for an examination of the uncounted punch cards and the machines that failed to count them.